Every few months, I am struck with the urge to rid myself of my worldly possessions. I’m finally at that place in my life where I can afford things for my house that actually match my style, and are not hand-me-downs from when we had to put my grandmother in the old folks home. So, every time I get something new, I take my old stuff to the Outreach Centre. I like taking my things there, because unlike the Village of Values, which makes a profit off the things I donate, the centre gives things directly to the people who need them. The centre is where people go when they’ve run out of money for the month, and the food bank has turned them away. Some of them really do have nothing, so when I take things there, I know that people really appreciate it.
The centre is in a dodgy neighbourhood downtown. It’s also just around the corner from one of the nicest hotels in my city. I remember about nine years ago, some friends and I spent the night dancing at that hotel bar, Ladeedahs. At 2 a.m., we went out to my car and witnessed an aboriginal woman being beaten by a man that she knew – a boyfriend, her pimp? – in a bus shelter. He seemed intoxicated and was throwing her against the thick glass walls and she was screaming at the top of her lungs. It was unlike anything I had ever heard – like a caged animal, shrieking, inhuman.
We just stood there, frozen. We had never seen anything like that before and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t even notice us standing there, watching, only a few yards away. We were in totally different worlds.
I ran. Ran to the back door of the club. Locked. Ran to the side, where I thought there would be payphones. Nope. Finally, frustrated and with tears streaming down my face, I stormed the front entrance of the ritzy hotel, pushed past the people in line at the desk and yelled at the clerk, “Call 911. There’s a woman being beaten.”
We drove around the block. They were sitting quietly in the bus shelter. She was crying. I could see the ambulance and the police car approaching in my rearview mirror and I knew that she would be okay. It was one of the few times in my life that I felt I had made a difference in someone’s life. Maybe she went back to him the next day, but for that night, she was safe. To this day, I don’t know if my friends would have done anything if I hadn’t.
I felt the same thing yesterday, though not on such a dramatic scale. I went to the Outreach Centre to unload my yuppie car of my no-longer stylish possessions: a comforter, sheets, towels, a shower curtain, a purse that it turned out that everyone in the damn city owns, some wire hangers, and two lamps. As I was unloading the trunk, an aboriginal man came out of the centre.
“Do you need some help?” he asked.
“Sure, if you could,” I replied.
“Those are nice lamps. I don’t have anything in my apartment.”
“Why don’t you take them, then?”
Looking over his shoulder at the people inside the centre, “I don’t know. I should probably ask them first.”
“Well, they’re my lamps, and I’m giving them to you. How about that?”
He smiled. “The only thing is that I’m on my bike, so I can’t take them. I wish I could though. I really need some lamps.”
“Where do you live?”
“Just two blocks from here.”
“How about we unload this other stuff and I’ll just drop the lamps off at your house?”
“Okay. You’d really do that?”
“Sure.”
We took the other items inside. The people inside the centre thanked me, and reprimanded him about taking the lamps: “You shouldn’t do that. You should let them come inside first.”
He told me where he lived, and we put the lamps in my back seat. At the last minute, he tossed his shoulder bag in my car as well. It was as though we had known each other for years or something – such a trusting gesture. Here was someone who had nothing, and just casually left one of his few possessions with a total stranger. For all he knew, I could take off, never to be seen again.
Mind you, for all I knew, I was just about to get knifed. As I drove the two blocks to his house, my paranoid side started kicking in. “What the hell are you doing?” I tucked my purse under my legs and locked my doors. “What good is that going to do, really? If you’re going to get stabbed, you’re going to get stabbed. And don’t even think about taking off – his bag’s in your car.”
He was just arriving as I drove up to his appartment. I unlocked the back door and he unloaded the lamps.
“Thank you so much,” he said, shaking my hand.
“You’re welcome. I’m glad I could help.”
“What’s your name?”
I told him.
“My name’s James,” he said, shaking my hand again.
“I can’t use my arm. I had to have surgery. See – this is where they connected my tendons,” he said, showing me the scars on the top and bottom of his left wrist.
“Oh?”
“I was walking out of the bar one night and this guy came up behind me and stabbed me in the back and arm – three times.”
“Oh.”
“Thanks again for the lamps. I really needed them,” he said, shaking my hand for the third time.
As I watched him walk away with the lamps, I wished I had taken a lint brush to the shades to get rid of the cat hair, and had been just a little more careful when I had loaded them into the trunk of my car that morning. I felt sad, and wished I could have done more. But I knew that, at the very least, James had light that night, and it was because of me.
